Speech Therapy for Children

Diagnoses treated

You may have noticed or been advised by another health professional that your child has:

• A speech/articulation delay or disorder
• A delay in starting to speak
• Autism
• ADHD/ADD
• A stammer
• Specific language impairment
• Expressive and/or receptive language delay/disorder

What is involved in the assessment?

An initial assessment for your child will normally last for an hour. This gives us an opportunity to meet you and your child and carry out a mixture of observation and formal/informal testing. A case history will be taken to find out about your child's developmental history; like when they said their first words or whether they have had their hearing tested.

Formal testing may involve showing pictures or giving a command and writing down/observing a child's response. A formal assessment gives us a standard score which we use to see how a child compares to their peers. An informal assessment may be similar but does not have normative data for their performance

What is involved in therapy?

Therapy for children needs to be a little bit FUN! Behind all the fun is a target to achieve and work towards. We often devise and play games to elicit a speech sound/behaviour or a unit of language. At first the child may not be able to use or follow the target unit of language or speech sound, so we offer varying levels of support and feedback to encourage it and gradually withdraw it until they can follow it or use it independently in various contexts.

If schools or nurseries are happy to carry out therapy we can work with staff to train and advise them on what they can do to help.